From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

890 Masking your Wonder Woman

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

890 Masking your Wonder Woman

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClellan. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Today, I have returned from Antarctica to the warm embrace of my hometown of Boulder Colorado, which Curiously, is much colder than it was on our first day on the coolest continent on the face of the planet. And speaking of continents, we are currently working on a project that is so epic, it spans two of them. Last week Antarctica and this week, North America, specifically inspired by an upcoming superhero flick, "Wonder Woman 1984." So today we're going to take our Wonder Woman, whether she's an actual woman, or a man or a woman inexplicably holding a soccer ball, and we're going to take her and put her against last week's colorful, gleaming ribbed glass W's, will we mask her? Yes, we will. Plus we'll refine that mask and we'll match the foreground to the background using Gradient Overlay effect. Other people, they watch blockbuster movies, you and I, we live them, whether we're on the most remote continent on the face of the planet, or right here at home. Here Let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so here's the final Wonder Woman poster effect just so you have a chance to see it on screen, and here's where we're at now. And so first thing I'm going to do is turn on the Wonder layer, which as you may recall, is a photograph that comes to us from the Dreamstime Image Library, about which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke. All right, so with this layer selected, I'm going to go up to the Select menu and choose the Subject command, and that way photoshop will just select the image automatically. Now we've got a few problems over here in the hand, and Photoshop has done a terrible job of selecting the soccer ball. But I'll go ahead and take what I have and turn it into a mask by clicking on the Add Layer Mask icon down here at the bottom of the Layers panel. Now the easiest way to select a soccer ball is to temporarily turn off the mask by shift clicking on its thumbnail, here inside the Layers panel. And then I'll switch from the Rectangular Marquee Tool to the Elliptical Marquee. And I'll go ahead and draw around that ball. Now you're probably not going to get it right, right off the bat, and so remember, if you need to move your ellipse around, you can press and hold the spacebar until you get the top and left edges in marquees aligned, then release the spacebar and continue dragging in order to scale that marquee. And I think right about here looks pretty darn good. All right, so shift click on the layer mask thumbnail to turn it back on. Make sure it's selected by the way, and then tap the D key to enstate the default foreground and background colors, which when you're working with the layer mask are white for the foreground and black for the background. We want to bring back the soccer ball, we need to fill this area with White, which you can do by pressing Alt + Backspace here in the PC or Option + Delete on the Mac, and them I'll press Control + D or Command + D on the Mac to deselect the image. All right, now we have a little extra white next to the hand right here and the best way to select that is to go ahead and grab the old school quick selection tool. And you want to turn on the auto enhance checkbox up here in the Options bar, then reduce the size of your cursor quite a bit by pressing the left bracket key a few times, and then just go ahead and drag inside that region, initially, it's going to look like a horrible selection until you release your mouse button, at which point things look much better. Now I missed a little bit of an edge right there, and so I'll just go ahead and drag again in order to add to that selection, and now I want to fill it with black inside the layer mask once again, and you can do that by pressing Control + Backspace, that's going to be a Command + Delete on the Mac. All right, now I'll press Control + D or Command + D on the Mac in order to deselect the image, and we've got just one more problem right here, the best way to select it I found is to use the lasso tool. So I'll go ahead and grab the lasso, which you can get by pressing the L key, and then I'll press and hold the Alt key, that's going to be the Option key on the Mac, keep that key down, because it's going to allow you to draw a polygonal selection outline, as I'm doing right here. And then once you're done, just go ahead and release that key and you will complete the selection. And now I'll fill that area with black inside the layer mask by pressing Control + Backspace or Command + Delete on the Mac. And now I'll press Control + D or Command + D, in order to deselect the image. Now by this point, many of you may have noticed that we have some pretty jagged transitions in the background. Part of the reason it looks that way is resumed in the 300%. But if that bothers you, is select that width 148% layer, because after all, it's covering up the color layer. And then you would go up to the filter menu, choose Noise and choose Median, which is the filter that allows you to smooth things in photoshop, and the lowest your radius value can go is one pixel at which point if you were to click okay, then things will look a lot smoother. I don't want that however, so I'm going to press Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac to undo that effect. All right, now press Control + zero or Command + zero on the Mac, to zoom out. And in the actual wonderwoman posters, the W's have symmetrical colors. So whereas in my case, I'm seeing one set of colors on the left, and one set of colors on the right, they're actually mirror images of each other. If that's the way you want things as well, then go ahead and switch back to the Rectangular Marquee tool here, and I'll start by selecting the left half of the image, and because I've got that vertical guide in place, I can select all the way to it and get exactly the image data I'm looking for, and then with a width 148% layer selected, I'll press Control + Alt + J or Command + Option + J on a Mac, to jump a copy of it, and force the display of the new layer dialog box. And I'll just go ahead and call this layer left and click okay. And now to flip a copy of it horizontally, I would load the layer selection outline by pressing the Control key or the Command key on the Mac, and clicking its thumbnail like so. And then what you'd want to do because we want to duplicate this guy, is press Control + Alt + T, or Command + Option + T on the Mac, there really isn't a commensurate command for that shortcut. So Control + ALT + T, or Command + Option + T on the Mac is the best way to go. Then if you're not seeing this little reference point matrix right here, on the far left side of the horizontal Options bar, then turn on this checkbox, and then what you want to do is select this right hand point inside the reference point matrix, then right click anywhere inside the canvas and choose Flip Horizontal in order to flip a duplicate of that selection. All right, so you may look at that and think gosh, that's really aren't the colors I'm looking for, in which case go ahead and turn the left layer off, you still got a selection, you want to keep it. So now I'll just go ahead and select the width 148% layer, and then let's jump a copy of it by pressing Control + Alt + J or Command + Option + J on a Mac, call this guy right this time around, click okay, reload its selection by Control or Command clicking on the thumbnail here inside the Layers panel, and then press Control + Alt + T or Command + Option + T on the Mac, in order to transform a copy of this guy, go up to the reference point matrix up here on the far left side of the Options bar and select the left point this time around, and then right click anywhere inside the image and choose Flip Horizontal in order to flip a copy of it from the right side to the left like so. And now you can go ahead and press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. And I'm just going to go ahead and press Control + D or Command + D on the Mac to deselect the image. I no longer need this guideline, so I'm going to go to the View menu and choose clear guides. Now, there's just one more thing I want to do, I figure that given that our model is surrounded by so many vibrant colors, that she should have a little color as well. And so I'll go ahead and click that top layer to select it, and then I'll drop down to the FX icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and I'll choose Gradient Overlay. And this is kind of like the gradient I came up with not quite, I'm going to click on that gradient ramp right there to bring up the Gradient Editor dialog box. I've got this opacity stamp above the gradient ramp that I don't want, so I'm just going to go ahead and drag it down like so, and then I'll drag this color stop all the way over to the left hand side, and I'll double click on it. And I'm looking for a shade of purple, as if this purple right here is reflecting off her skin, and so I'll change the hue value to 270 degrees, saturation and brightness values of 90% are just fine, now I'll click okay. And next, I'll double click on this orange color stop, or at least the last stop, and these are the values I want, a hue value of 40 degrees for orange, saturation and brightness this time 100%, and I'll click okay, and I'll click okay again. And then here inside the Layer Style dialog box, we're looking for a style of linear an angle of zero degrees, and notice that I've taken the scale value way down to just 10%. And that way, we're seeing a lot of the color interface. Now what that means is that we have a very rapid transition inside of her shirt and her pants, so if you don't want that, you're going to have to increase the scale value, but you're going to lose a lot of the color in the skin tones. So that's really up to you. Now then, notice that I've set the Blend Mode to Vivid Light, although you can experiment with one or the other contrast modes if you like. And then I'm going to take the opacity value down to just 33%, so we have a slightly less garish effect. And then I'll click okay in order to accept that change. All right now there's just one thing that's still bugging me, notice if I zoom in on her hair, I'm seeing some of that white background. If I'm interested in softening things a little bit, I'm going to go ahead and click on the layer mask thumbnail here inside the Layers panel, and then I would press the Shift key and go to the Select menu and choose Select and Mask. And because the shift key is down, instead of bringing up the ginormous Select and Mask workspace, I have the good old refine mask dialog box, which I love so much more. And now I'm just going to take the radius value up to 20 pixels, and if I were to switch from On White to On Layers, for example, you can see that I get rid of that extra white. Now I'm softening the mask all over the place, but that's okay by me. And so I'll just go ahead and click okay, in order to accept that change, I'll press Shift + F in order to switch to the full screen mode. And I'll go ahead and press Control + zero, or Command + zero on a Mac to center my zoom. And that's how you go about adding a powerful Wonder Woman. In my case for some reason holding a soccer ball to your Wonder Woman poster effect here inside Photoshop. Okay, that's it for this week, next week, not quite sure, it might have something to do with metadata, which may sound boring, but if I get it right, and the bar is awfully high on this one, it might be the best technique I've done so far. Deke's Techniques each and every week, keep watching.

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